Our Mission

RepresentWomen is a nonpartisan initiative committed to achieving gender parity in appointed and elected office. We advocate for institutional reforms to level the playing field for women candidates, enabling them to run, win, and lead effectively. Our goal is fair representation for women and men across the political, racial, and geographic spectrum, so that our daughters and their daughters can engage with our democracy as equals.

The election of women will strengthen our democracy.

Women make up half the population, but only 19 percent of Congress, less than 25 percent of state legislative and statewide executive positions, and under 20 percent of city and county officials. Even worse, progress towards equal representation has stagnated at every level of elected office, and we’re falling far behind the rest of the world. This is unacceptable.

Electing more women to every level of government will strengthen our democracy by making it more representative, reviving bi-partisanship & collaboration, improving policy outcomes, encouraging a new style of leadership, and building greater trust in our elected bodies.

Need a more specific example of this problem? RepresentWomen’s founder is from a small city in Maryland where there is only one woman on the city council and only two of nine county council seats and two of four state legislative seats are held by a woman. Maryland has never elected a woman governor, attorney general, or state comptroller, and the state’s 2017 delegation of U.S. Senators and U.S. House Members is all male.

We focus on structural change as a medium of progress.

RepresentWomen supports efforts to dismantle gender stereotypes and to train and fund individual women candidates, but we believe that without institutional reforms, we will never achieve gender parity.

RepresentWomen conducts research and engages in advocacy for each of these reforms:

Recruitment targets for political parties, PACs, and donors - so more women run